These are the books I’ve just been reading, a pile from my bedside table. (There’s another shelf below with more, some of them abandoned mid-read, some of them finished but there’s no shelf space for them anywhere else in the house.) There are days–and this is one of them–when I wish I’d kept track over the years of books read, with a few notes, and dates. I love seeing other people’s reading logs. (Vicki Ziegler, also known as Bookgaga on social media, occasionally features her notebook on Twitter or at her website, each entry in her beautiful handwriting, and I have that sense of time accumulating and not simply passing when I look.) But somehow, like keeping a regular and devoted journal, I don’t do it.

What I am, however, is a devoted reader. Sometimes, around 4 p.m., particularly if the day has been busy, I think to myself, In 3 hours you will be reading! I’ve never watched much television and so after dinner, after dishes, I head upstairs to arrange 4 pillows behind me and I get into bed to read. This time of year the windows are all open and I can hear the evening chorus–robins, Swainson’s thrushes, western tanagers, and others. Sometimes there’s skittering in the rose canes by the south-facing window and on several occasions I’ve seen a weasel peering in at me, as surprised to see me as I am to see the weasel. I read during the day too but mostly it’s what I think of as writing-related. The two volumes of Celia Paul you can see in the photograph and the Adam Phillips are partly for research for a long essay I wrote over the winter and am now revising. I have to say I’d have read these books in any case because they’re so interesting. But reading them to confirm or to support something in my work gives me license to read them during the day.

Every week I visit the library in Sechelt and I bring home at least 4 books, sometimes more. The Charles Frazier, War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets, and the Tom Rachman are all library books. The day I bring new ones home is always quietly exciting. I love reaching down from my bed to the bag of books and just beginning whichever one comes to hand. I began War Diary last night and it’s so good but also harrowing so when I woke after midnight and couldn’t get back to sleep, I chose a novel, The Tracker by Charles Frazier, because I didn’t want to think about missiles and Putin in the middle of the night. Last night the world was quiet as I read by the light of my little reading lamp but often I hear owls, the Who-cooks-for-you-Who-cooks-for-you-all of the barred and the high-pitched beeps of the saw-whet. Once I heard a female cougar howling in estrus and often there are coyotes just beyond the house. But last night it was quiet.

I learned to read before I went to school, perhaps at the age of 5, and one of my greatest childhood pleasures was being taken to the Victoria Public Library on the corner of Yates Street and Blanshard to apply for a library card. My older brothers taught me to print my name, a requirement for the card, and I remember being told I could take 6 books home. I knew nothing about the shelving systems and honestly it didn’t occur to me to look much higher than the bottom 2 shelves in the children’s section. I’d lie on the cool floor (I think it was marble) and run my fingers along the spines of the books until one spoke to me. Often it was the same few. I read books over and over again and can still remember certain sentences, plots, characters. My favourite childhood books are ones I’ve loved reading to my grandchildren. Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose, Blue Willow by Doris Gates, a handful of Beatrix Potter tales. For Christmas, an elderly friend gave me English girls’ annuals and I was interested in the stories of plucky children who rescued horses and negotiated boarding school cruelties. Then, as now, I’d panic if I didn’t have a stack of books by my bed for the week.

Often when I come to bed, I see that 3 or 4 of the books on my table have bookmarks in them (a felted snake made by a young friend, a length of ribbon, an old receipt, an emery board) and I ask myself how it is that I have so many books in progress. How will I choose tonight? Is this a mark of a careless mind? But then I remember Virginia Woolf, also an avid reader, and someone who wrote about the pleasures of it in her letters, her essays, and her journals:

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

She’s right, I think. All the beautiful notes, the music they make together, in real time, in retrospect, and over a lifetime of reading. Still, I wish I had a shelf of my own notebooks, reminding me of the rich and complicated score of a life spent reading, each title listed, recorded, an accumulation.